Is it worth running your own DNS-level filtering stack instead of relying on managed services?

05 Eyl 08:00

I've been going back and forth on this for a while. On one hand, spinning up your own filtering layer on a VPS gives you full control over blocklists, query logs, and custom rules. On the other hand, managed services handle updates, scaling, and DDoS resilience out of the box. The total cost picture (infra + maintenance time vs. subscription fees) seems like it could go either way depending on scale. For founders running side projects or small SaaS, what threshold made you switch from one approach to the other? Curious how others think about the trade-off between operational complexity and monthly burn.